


[Fandom stats] The Star Wars fandom awakens!

by toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [52]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2019-09-11 22:04:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16861111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: A look at trends in the Star Wars fandom on AO3 following The Force Awakens.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally [posted to Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/143364198849/bigger-bigger-bigger-bigger-toastystats). This post was followed by a variety of interesting feedback and theorizing. Part of that conversation evolved into a heated discussion about race and fandom. If you're interested in hearing more about that, I recommend listening to the Fansplaining [two-parter podcast](http://fansplaining.com/post/144557202888/flourish-and-elizabeth-follow-up-on-the-last) or [reading excerpts](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fansplaining:_Race_and_Fandom_Part_1_and_2).

**TOASTYSTATS: THE STAR WARS FANDOM AWAKENS!**

I took a look at what’s been happening in the Star Wars fandom since the release of The Force Awakens (and earlier).

_A special request, because I know there’s been some controversy in the fandom: be kind to one another in the notes of this post.  Thoughtful discussion of ships or anything else is awesome, but don’t be mean about what anyone else likes.  I see every reblog note and tag in my activity tab, and any ship hate or other wank will make me a sad toast._

**Click through for summary, notes, updates, corrections.**

[[MORE]]

**Omissions & corrections**

Oops -- I left out one of the highly active ships!   _Poe Dameron/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren_ has had 311 fanworks and should be just above Poe/Rey in the above AO3 ships list.  


**Finn/Poe**

_Edit1:_ I’m still curious about the Finn/Poe dropoff, despite suggestions and partial theories... I’d love to hear your thoughts and theories on that and anything else that gets you thinking in the slides above.  One thing that has been suggested to me by a number of folks is that [John Boyega said](https://twitter.com/chris_mandle/status/684779941322424321) around the time of the dropoff that the Finn/Poe romance was only in Oscar’s head.  A couple things make me a little skeptical that this tells the whole story...  (1) Rey on AO3 and #Reylo on Tumblr starting to drop at the same time -- what’s going on there?? and (2) have you ever known a slash fan to let a denial of “It’s not going to be canon” shut down their shipping?  :)  Still, it could be a contributing factor!  


 _Edit2:_ Another factor many people have brought up: race.  It seems very likely that is an influencing factor here -- how could it not be, given that society at large (and fandom as a part of it) certainly have a LOT issues around race, and in aggregate, POC ships are much less common across most fandoms.  However, I don’t think that’s the whole story, either -- it’s interesting that Finn/Poe had a meteoric rise at the start (when so many ships featuring POC never get popular at all), and followed by a steeper decline than I’ve often seen.  And it’s also interesting that (white) Rey also saw an early peak, at least on AO3.  So it’s not a super simple story there of how race caused this, even though it’s a likely contributing factor.  

There are also some fascinating discussions going on in reblogs about how -- partly because of race and perceived problems around fetishization of non-whites in fic -- some fans might be more comfortable writing kinky shit for Kylux than Stormpilot.  Really interesting -- I’ll try to aggregate some of those notes here later.  


 _Edit3:_ I got some questions about whether the ship tags I chose on Tumblr made a difference -- answered [here](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/143654637554/okay-it-may-be-a-stupid-question-and-you-mightve).

I also did some stats looking at [average kudos for each ship, and how explicit each ship is](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/143657659154/these-star-wars-stats-are-fascinating-im-not).

**Other notes**

I know a lot of people are eager to see these stats ASAP, so I’m actually not going to write further extensive notes to start with... though I’ll come back and fill them in as they occur to me.  Please do let me know if you have questions, corrections, or clarifications, though!  (I almost let a huge error in my data slip through that said that Finn had almost no fanworks about him on AO3 relative to the other characters -- who knows what other issues there might be that you can help me catch! :)  If you see something that seems impossibly weird, do please let me know.)

But here are a few things:

  * [Raw data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oFvpavoJIxDDg5Xrx9xpEw08LxMhVpMXEIeNmtkPZQw/edit#gid=1707173070)!  Have at the spreadsheet, yo. :)
  * Everything in that screencap of all the Star Wars subfandoms is available more legibly [here](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Star%20Wars%20-%20All%20Media%20Types) (scroll down).
  * I chose the other 5 top fandoms most active at the moment based on my [2015 Year in Fandom](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/136470640483/so-yeah-partly-inspired-by-elizabethminkel-and) stats.
  * Some folks thought I didn’t include polyships -- I did!  Finn/Poe/Rey is there on the slides. :D  (Sharing my biases here -- it’s my fave ship!)  More details about [other polyships here](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/143399160609/star-wars-poly-ship-stats).
  * Thanks so much to Mrs. Toasty, Lisa E., and their housemates for beta feedback.  Remaining errors are my own.
  * Thanks for [brainstorming about the stormpilot surge/dropoff](https://twitter.com/DestnToast/status/724102935081156609) on Twitter from a bunch of awesome folks -- sorry if I missed anyone -- @DanaSuze and [@elizabethminkel](https://tmblr.co/mKxeq3gVUbkMajO-OqrduCw) @betty_days [@jsalowe](https://tmblr.co/m68OwDn-MziUvarZOjPZPOQ) [@arcadianmaggie](https://tmblr.co/msGoO5KM_QJSGWtGa_2dj8g)!  I will try to go back later and collect those notes and theories and add them here.  Thanks also for general delightful banter and encouragement. :D




	2. Poly ships

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A quick update about poly ships.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/143399160609/star-wars-poly-ship-stats).

I'm getting a few comments that I should have included Finn/Poe/Rey as part of my [Star Wars stats](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/143364198849/bigger-bigger-bigger-bigger-toastystats)... It's actually there, listed with its official AO3 tag, **Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey**.  With **560 fanworks** , it totes made it to the top 5 SW ships and is there on the slides.. :D  (So are each of the component pairings.  And if you’re wondering -- if a fic was tagged with multiple relationship tags, it will show up in all relevant categories).

This ship, aka Jedistormpilot, is doing AMAZINGLY WELL for a poly ship -- both compared to the other SW ships and compared to other poly ships!  I think it's likely to be the most active poly ship on AO3 right now, but I haven't confirmed. (full disclosure, it’s also my fave SW ship... I wouldn’t neglect it!  Though I would leave it off the graph if the stats had made me, and only show it in the raw data if it weren’t so active. ;) )

I also did more stats on many other ships that weren't as big and so didn't make it into the slides, but you can see them at the bottom of [this spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oFvpavoJIxDDg5Xrx9xpEw08LxMhVpMXEIeNmtkPZQw/edit#gid=1154835865).   (For the AO3 slides, only ships with > 100 fanworks since TFA made it into the slides... which is a pretty high bar!!)  Those stats included two other poly ships:

  * **Hux/Kylo Ren/Rey** with 50 fanworks
  * **Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo** with 27 fanworks since TFA (yep -- the debates about who it's okay to ship together go WAY back in this fandom. but there is always room for all ships in my stats! :) )  




There may also be more active SW polyships out there.  I wasn’t comprehensive in analyzing all possible ships.  But wanted to point these out, since I do have stats on them!


	3. The popularity and explicitness of different ships

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to a reader question about whether reading patterns matched writing patterns in 2016.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/143657659154/these-star-wars-stats-are-fascinating-im-not).

@bakingstreetsarah asked:

> These Star Wars stats are fascinating! I'm not sure how easy/hard it is to crunch the numbers, but this is entirely about fic production-- I wonder if the numbers match on fic /consumption/? Do the hit numbers for each type of fic mirror the number of fics? I'd ask if the proportion held true in fics with the top 10% of hits, but that would skew to older fics (because they've had more time to accumulate hits) so I would expect Stormpilot to be favored.

Great question!  I just did some stats about kudos (and the distribution of kudos usually closely mirrors that of hits) to get at what AO3 readers like.  (This is sadly much harder to do on other platforms; haven’t figured out how yet, for the most part.)

Okay, if we look at the average number of kudos per ship over all time (sorting by kudos and finding the median), we see the following pattern:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipOyCZkPoZGV_Ww7RsZIuu_PeeE4xrJQhoZuVyUo?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

From this, it looks like Finn/Poe and Finn/Poe/Rey might get produced less, but are the most popular among readers! **However, we need to remember that[those ships got popular earlier](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/143364198849/bigger-bigger-bigger-bigger-toastystats), so a lot of those fanworks have been around longer to gather more kudos.  **

If we just look at fanworks from the past month, we get the following: 

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipON-OTxyWqpq9R7TbZGtLmPHpQg62SlmfBj7l7e?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

**Basically all the differences between the ships disappear** (the minor differences left should not be taken as meaningful given this data set and my methods).  Now we can just see that **all these ships are incredibly popular on average compared to the Star Wars fanworks overall (which is 30% gen fic), and to AO3 overall.** (And Star Wars as a whole is way more popular on average than AO3 overall.)  


In some of the meta that’s been going around, people have been talking about moving to shipping Kylux because it’s less fraught to write Explicit fic there for a number of reasons.  I was curious whether that ship really does have a lot more Explicit fic:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipPMYHl27zrtqxlL4IPd5xWV29xVqvLoQdpqv9SO?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Yep, **Kylux is disproportionately explicit!**  (Though all the ships, having been around a bit now, have been more explicit in the past month – I suspect maybe this happens in many fandoms as ships are around longer and people exhaust the obvious fluff?)   **Reylo is also more explicit than both Stormpilot and Jedistormpilot.**

**People don’t seem to be writing _less_ smut for (Jedi)Stormpilot than AO3 or SW produces on average** – these two ships seem to be about typical compared to those larger categories.  However, note that I’m comparing (Jedi)Stormpilot to SW and AO3 fic OVERALL, not just to the shippy fic in those categories;  **(Jedi)Stormpilot probably is less smutty on average than just the shippy fic in those categories** (but I don’t have that data).

Another interesting thing to note, though – **[explicit fic usually gets a lot more kudos](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/65586599242/popularity-word-count-and-ratings-on-ao3-faq) than the other rating categories.** **So it’s interesting to me that Stormpilot and Jedistormpilot get just as many kudos** while being less explicit than the other two big ships.


End file.
